I have never done this. So, take my advice for what it's worth. Nevertheless, from my reading, I believe it is possible to do what you want; however, you won't be able to go directly DBI to access UNLESS you move your perl client over to a windows box: Access doesn't run on Linux. Otherwise, you'll have to go through ODBC to get remote access to Access.

For the Linux side, you'll need: Perl, DBI and DBD::ODBC

For the Windows side, you'll need an MS Access odbc driver. I Googled around and it seems like they are out there, esp. for windows server.

Then, you need to configure odbc on your access server.

Once that's done, DBI from your linux client as usual.

Sounds like a royal pain. Unless you absolutely need the ability to update a live copy of the Access db, why not just dump it to a csv file and loading it into your favorite db on linux?